Top 10 WORST Wii U Games

We remember a time when fans were clamouring for new entries in this adorable sim series. However, this spin-off made it clear that the franchise should just stick to making players work for Tom Nook and increasing the size of their house. Amiibo Festival ditched the simulation elements and instead gave players a party board game similar to Nintendo’s own Mario Party. However, the whole package was widely seen as a ploy to get players to buy more of Nintendo’s Amiibo figures, as they’re required for gameplay, and the game itself was considered clunky and boring. We’d rather run endless errands for our neighbours than play this.

The pedigree on this game alone was enough to get gamers hyped. It was a crowdfunded side-scrolling platformer from Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man, and was widely considered to be the spiritual successor to that beloved series. Even though it got 400% of its intended Kickstarter goal, Inafune’s latest brainchild was still considered a massive disappointment given the talent behind it. Everything in Mighty No. 9 is aggressively mediocre, from the level and character design, to its voice acting and technical performance, especially on the Wii U. Even worse, many of the game’s financial backers received botched rewards, leading to an outcry from them. This game proved to be more of a Zero than a Mega Man.

If the Wii U was touted as Nintendo finally taking HD gaming seriously, then why was one of its launch titles a port of an arcade game from three years earlier? As the excitable but childish title suggests, this game puts players in control of what else, tanks, and has them take on varieties of monsters, including dragons and spiders. For a launch title, the game contained little depth outside of local multiplayer, and no online play; a sin in this day and age. This one is low on the list because despite its mediocrity, Bandai Namco later made it free to play via the Nintendo eShop, mitigating some of the backlash it caused.

Activision came up with a great idea for the James Bond series 50th anniversary: A virtual journey through some of the agent’s most iconic moments. And while Bond games gave consoles some great FPS experiences in the past, most notably Goldeneye for the N64, Legends failed to live up to its potential. This was in part due to it being labelled as a Call of Duty clone, while also trying to cram content from six movies into it. To add insult to injury, the Wii U version was considered the weakest of the console versions, due to poor graphical performance and online play, as well as ineffective use of the Gamepad controller.

Honestly, it shouldn’t be hard to make a halfway decent Fast and Furious game. All we want and need is Vin Diesel and vehicular mayhem. Unfortunately, Showdown, released around the same time as the 6th movie in the franchise, proved to be the gaming equivalent of a thirty car pileup. It’s basically a poorly made vehicular combat/racing game with the Fast and Furious name slapped on it. The game has little to do with the movies outside of level recreations and mediocre cutscenes, and comes complete with laughable physics and crippling bugs.

Not even in our worst nightmares could we have imagined a game like this. Basically, this is what would happen if a 4Chan board mutated into a video game. Meme Run is an endless runner where a player with a troll face runs through a world comprised of every meme the internet has to offer. The objective is to collect as many “swag points” as possible, while the soothing sound of “wombo combo” plays every time an item is gathered. The game’s creator even said that it was intended to “troll” gamers, so it came as no surprise when it was taken off the eShop.

When your console is home to Super Smash Bros., most other fighting games are probably going to suffer in comparison. Still, this eShop exclusive fighter would be a poor option no matter what console it was released on. A weapon based fighter in the vein of Soul Calibur, this game does little to elevate itself from its superior competition. It features a tired fighting system, bland, uninspired graphics, and a crippling framerate, rendering the game almost unplayable. But hey, at least you can still pick from an interesting roster of characters like Sword Girl, Other Sword Girl, Bald Guy With Staff, and… dinosaur.

If we didn’t know any better, this game would brand the Nintendo eShop as a cauldron of bad original games. Compared unfavourably to games like Slender, this title promises an intriguing mystery shrouded in darkness, and then fails to deliver on every conceivable level. The journey of a boy looking for his lost father was criticized as being an unfinished and poor excuse for a video game. Reviews also cited it as a major example of Nintendo’s lack of quality control, proving that if a game like this could be approved and sold for ANY amount of money, then there were no standards of quality for the company anymore.

Everyone thought Nintendo was going to learn from its mistakes with the Wii and enforce a stronger level of quality control on the Wii U, thus limiting the amount of abysmal mini game collections on the system. Alas, this party game was released less than a month after the Wii U launched, showing that the sins of the father will not be forgotten on Nintendo’s new platform. Family Party is terrible even by shovelware standards, with unbearably bad controls, annoying character design, and terrible mini-games.

Before we reveal our top pick, here are a couple of dishonorable mentions:

Just when we all thought Sonic couldn't go any lower than his 2006 Anniversary disaster, Sega decided to wrap bandages around everyone and give their main cast a complete redesign in appearance, and in Kunckles's case: a few less brain cells. That didn’t go well as Rise of Lyric was a mess of a Sonic game. Receiving harsh critiques for its terrible game design, glitches galore, subpar graphics and obnoxious dialogue where the characters won't shut up about FREAKING BOUNCE PADS! Despite the infamously negative reception and being the worst selling game in the Sonic series; Sega continues the Sonic Boom game series, though only on the 3DS. At least the TV show this game is based on isn’t too bad.